How should a person inhabit a perfectly elegant, black-and-white cartoon panel? That’s the issue faced by the cast of “All Our Happy Days Are Stupid,” the play in pursuit of a style by Sheila Heti, best known for the identity-pursuing novel “How Should a Person Be?” It is an issue that’s never resolved.

For this meandering tale of unworldly Canadians on vacation in Paris, which opened on Thursday night at the Kitchen, a marvelous, fanciful set has been devised by Rae Powell. Everything onstage — which includes the Eiffel Tower, sidewalk cafes, hotel rooms, jam jars and cigarettes — has been rendered as black-and-white cutouts that suggest a particularly chic graphic novel.

The performers have been costumed (by Juliann Wilding) to match, right down to their fingernail polish. And when a man dressed as a bear shows up, of course it’s as a panda, so he doesn’t upset the color scheme.

The overall effect is of witty and severe whimsy, without a disruptive pastel or primary shade in sight. I am sad to report that the production, directed by Jordan Tannahill with Erin Brubacher, does not live up to the décor.

I took this discrepancy rather personally, as if I were watching a new friend, whom I’d been eager to know better, embarrass herself at a party she’d invited me to. I have the feeling other audience members at this production, which runs through next Saturday, may feel the same, though they’re likely to forgive the discomfort.

Ms. Heti, after all, became famous as a specialist in discomfort with “How Should a Person Be? A Novel From Life” (2010), in which she subjected her fictional alter-ego and narrator, named Sheila, to extremes of unflattering exposure. Critics have compared Ms. Heti’s willingness to get naked in print — and her confidence in displaying insecurity — to Lena Dunham’s self-presentation on “Girls” (and elsewhere).

“How Should a Person Be?” took this sensibility a step further than Ms. Dunham’s series. It turned its questing, groping, self-denying outlook into its very form. The novel (or demi-novel, since much of it, including transcribed conversations with friends, was drawn directly from Ms. Heti’s own life in Toronto), is written in a sort of stream-of-self-consciousness in search of a consciousness to call its own.

At the center of that search is a play that the narrator, Sheila, had been commissioned to write and cannot begin to finish. That’s partly because, like many artists, she has invested her gestating project with grand parental expectations; she wants it to change the world.

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From left, Lorna Wright, Ms. Skwarna and Alexander Carson in this work, taking place during a Paris vacation.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

Knowing that no play is likely to accomplish this, she curses it and avoids it, procrastinating with voluble anguish over many pages. At the novel’s end, she puts the play aside, realizing that perhaps another form is better suited to her explorations. Like a novel. Like this very novel, in fact, which is incredibly irritating and a great read.

The discarded play that haunts “How Should a Person Be?” is the play that has now arrived at the Kitchen, courtesy of the Suburban Beast company of Toronto. Readers of Ms. Heti’s novel will recognize details of plot that Sheila stews over. And the more voyeuristic among them will be pleased to discover that Carl Wilson, Ms. Heti’s ex-husband and a character in the novel, is onstage, playing a character called the Prince for All Seasons.

Anyone planning a thesis on Ms. Heti (though it seems early days for such a project) will presumably want to see this production, since it would seem to represent another Hetian (though it seems early days for such a term) intersection of art and life.

And, yes, many of the classic Hetian themes are in place in this story of dysfunctional innocents abroad: female friendship as an elusive holy grail, adulthood as an illusion, the hunger for authenticity and the chimerical nature of happiness.

These subjects are embodied most flamboyantly by two suburban mothers in souring marriages. They are Mrs. Oddi (Naomi Skwarna, in a white Louise Brooks wig and white fingernail polish) and Mrs. Sing (Becky Johnson, black Louise Brooks wig and black fingernail polish), who may or may not be destined to bond after Mrs. Sing’s 13-year-old son (the appealing Nicholas Hune-Brown) goes missing in Paris.

The characters — who also include the women’s husbands (Alexander Carson and John McCurley) and the precocious 12-year-old Jenny Oddi (Lorna Wright) — speak in annoyed, semi-epigrammatic dialogue. (“It is so tedious to have a family.” Or: “My first boyfriend — oh, he smoked a very big pipe — he always said, ‘Men make the world, and women decorate it.’ ”)

Their exchanges are punctuated by bleak and ironic poetic songs from a guitar-strumming troubadour (the musician Henri Fabergé). And, oh, it all starts to feel painful very early on.

This is mostly because you sense that the performers, who use a motley mix of mismatched and undercooked techniques, are even more uncomfortable in their skins than the characters they portray.

Generating vicarious embarrassment may well be Ms. Heti’s signature. But this style works a lot better, as it did in “How Should a Person Be?,” when you feel that it’s a deliberate choice.

Correction:

A theater review on Saturday about “All Our Happy Days Are Stupid,” at the Kitchen in Manhattan, misidentified the performer who plays the guitar-strumming troubadour. He is Henri Fabergé — not Dan Bejar, who wrote the songs he performs.